Gaza
Gaza potters raise clay dome houses as models while Israel blocks cement
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
A house made of clay stands in Gaza as a sample of what the territory's builders can do with the one material Israel cannot block: the ground itself. A widely shared AJ+ video this week walks viewers through the model home, raised as a template for families still living in tents.
The best-documented of these builders is Jaafar Atallah, a potter displaced from northern Gaza whose family's pottery factory was destroyed in the war. After two years in a tent, he gathered some fifteen people and built his parents a dome-shaped house of clay bricks, the Financial Times reported — shaped like the bread ovens his family has made for generations, but big enough to live in.
The mix took five or six prototypes before it held: clay dug from the land, worked with water, ash and powdered glass. The finished dome, in the paper's telling, is solid enough to stand on.
A dome of clay bricks, solid enough to stand on, built by fifteen pairs of hands
The Financial Times, on Jaafar Atallah's house for his parents
He is not alone. The pan-Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat reported this summer that Gazans across the strip are turning to clay and rubble for new homes, and Al Jazeera filmed men rebuilding room by room with mud and salvaged stone as early as January.
Sisters Tala and Farah Mousa, whose own house was bombed, developed a method of crushing and sieving rubble into reusable blocks bound with clay, ash or glass powder. Their project, Build Hope Palestine, won an Earth Foundation youth award in May, with the $12,500 prize funding workshops to teach the technique.
The precedent is older than this war. UNRWA built mud-brick houses in Gaza after the 2008-09 offensive, when Israel's blockade barred cement, and engineering studies from that period proposed earth construction as reconstruction's stopgap.
The need has never been on this scale. Around 1.9 million displaced people are seeking shelter among tents and rubble while reconstruction material waits at crossings Israel controls — and a dome of fired earth in Gaza now shows what rebuilding looks like when it cannot wait for permission.
